A custom search engine is one that can be created by anyone. The developers can choose which websites to add to the search engine, limit the results to only those domains and search within the website. The conventional way to go about it was to take a for from an existing open source project like Solr or Elastic search and then build the required features and the UI to add to a website. This was by no means an easy task and would often involve heavy developer costs.
You can use Google to search a single website when you are confident the information is on a specific site but don’t know where to look to find it. You may remember that you saw a great recipe on a magazine’s website but don’t remember the issue. Sometimes the site itself may have a problematic internal search. Either way, it is often faster and easier to search for a key phrase and specify that you only want results from a specific website.
To limit Google search to a single website use site:sitename.com along with the search query.
To add a search engine to your website and follow these steps:
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
